Cognitive Key Question Flashcards
what is eye witness testimony?
Eye-witness testimony is the account/recall of an event or crime given in court. The statements that are given often include descriptions of the criminal & details of the crime scene, such as the sequence of events, the time of day & if others witnessed the event. However, people will tend to interpret what they see in terms of what they expect to happen & their memories tend to reflect that. Psychologists have revealed that people’s memory of a crime/accident scene is often inaccurate & therefore unreliable.
what is the Devlin report (and explain it)?
In 1973, The Innocence Project found that there were 850 cases where eye-witness testimony was the only evidence of guilt. In 74% of the cases, the accused was found guilty by the jury. The Devlin committee considered the evidence around reliability of the testimony. The advised that no jury should convict on eye-witness testimony alone.
explain the example of Ronald Cotton:
Donald Cotton was exonerated in 1995, after spending over 10 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. His convictions were based largely on an eye-witness misidentification made by one of the victims, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino. Jennifer was 100% sure she had the right man on both photo line-up & live line up. But in the spring of 1995, his case was given a major break: DNA testing evidence of a semen sample proved he was innocent.
It was for rape
explain the example of Steve Titus:
he was convicted of 1st degree rape on March 1981.
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus argued at trial that the victim had elicited a false memory of the attacker due to a biased line up.
- She said her perceptions had been changed throughout the process of going to court through clues which created a false memory.
explain reconstructive memory in terms of cognitive factors that affect eye-witness testimony (A02):
Eye-Witness Testimony reconstruct memory of criminal events to fit with schemas which help people to understand unfamiliar situations (E.g. The perpetrators appearance triggers eye-witnesses schemas about type of appearance, encoding the real perpetrator differently to reality).
Reconstructive memory describes the fact that memory is not passive or a true record, instead it is an active reconstruction based on schemas that an individual possesses.
Schemas are mental constructs that form the structural components of human memory. They are unique to an individual & their previous knowledge, expectations, motivations & perceptions.
Memory makes use of schemas to organise things. When we recall an event, our schemas tell us what it
‘supposed’ to happen. The schemas might fill in the gaps in our memory (Confabulation) & even put pressure on our mind to remember things in a way that fits in with the schema, removing or changing details (Rationalisation).
Omissions are one of the four active reconstruction processes & it occurs when people leave out information that they don’t understand. Transformations are changing ideas into conventional concepts.
Familiarisations occur when unfamiliar details are changed to align with our own personal schema & rationalisation is the use of cultural ideals.
Evidence: Bartlett conducted a study in which he read a Native American story: The War of the Ghosts to a group of Europeans & later asked them to recall the story. However, because it was an unusual story from a different culture, the Europeans made several mistakes in their recall. Bartlett concluded that participants were changing unfamiliar information to make it fit their own culture & contained more & more changes with each recollection. This has huge implications for recollection of important events like eye-witness testimony.
reasons for this:
reconstructive memory changes our memory based on our schema, this can be linked to eye witness testimony as someone may choose the wrong person from what they think as their memory has been reconstructed.
explain the working memory model in terms of cognitive factors that affect eye witness testimony:
The Working Memory Model suggests that both sound & visual information can be processed at the same time, so an Eye- Witnesses memory of an event should be accurate, as the Visual Spatial Sketchpad & the Phonological Loop can process different information at the same time, this means that the evidence should be reliable enough to be used within a courtroom.
Evidence: Baddeley and Hitch (1976) investigated whether participants can use different parts of working memory at the same time using a dual task experiment in which participants were asked to perform 2 tasks at the same time - A digit span task which required them to repeat a list of numbers & a verbal reasoning task which required them to answer true or false to various questions (E.g. B is followed by A?).
They found that as the number of digits increased in the digit span tasks, participants took longer to answer the reasoning questions, but only by fractions of a second. They also didn’t make any more errors in the verbal reasoning tasks as the number of digits increased.
explain Bartlett’s schema theory in terms of cognitive factors that effect eye witness testimony:
Schemas are shortcuts which facilitate the quick processing of information and stop the brain from becoming overwhelmed by environmental stimulation. They allow us to predict what may happen and are based on previous experience. They act as a mental framework for the interpretation of incoming information.
Evidence: Loftus & Palmer’s (1974) experiment aimed to investigate the ways in which memory can be influenced by post-event information. showed students film clips of real car crashes & set them a questionnaire to answer. Come students read a critical question with an intense verb (E.g. How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other) but others read less intense verbs like hit/contacted.
Participants exposed to the ‘smashed’ verb recalled a higher speed (40.8mph on average) than participants exposed to ‘hit’ (34mph). Loftus & Palmer tested participants again a week later, asking them if there was any broken glass, which was recalled correctly by 12% of the Control group (who weren’t asked about the speed of the cars) & 14% of the ‘hit’ group, however 32% of the ‘smashed’ group falsely recalled broken glass.
Reasons for this:
our schema towards the diff. words will change what we think will happen in the event.
explain Tulving’s theory of episodic and semantic memory:
Episodic memories are context dependent, so a witness’ memory would likely be more accurate if they were taken back to the crime scene, as they would have context cues & their testimony would be more accurate.
Evidence: Godden & Baddeley used divers as participants and their 2 natural environments were a beach and underwater. They asked 18 deep-sea divers to memorize a list of 36 unrelated words of 2 or 3 syllables. One group did this on the beach and the other group underwater. When they were asked to remember the words half of the beach learners remained on the beach, the rest had to recall underwater.
Half of the underwater group remained there & the others had to recall on the beach. They found that the groups that learnt & recalled in the same environment recalled significantly more words that the group whose environment changed.
explain the multi store model of memory in terms of cognitive factors that affect eye witness testimony:
The Multi-Store Model of Memory suggests that for a memory to go into your Short-Term Memory it has to be paid attention to. In a situation, not all information is paid attention to. Therefore, it is likely that not all of the features of the crime will be paid attention to, meaning that an Eye-Witness may potentially miss important information when recalling the crime in court.
The Multi-Store Model of Memory also suggests that information is only stores in the Short-Term memory for up to 30 seconds, for it to move into the Long-Term Memory it needs to be rehearsed.
Therefore, some information may be forgotten if it has not been rehearsed, meaning that the story given by the Eye-Witness may be missing some key information.
Evidence: Glanzer & Cunitz (1966) “Serial Position Effect” found that people recalled more words from the beginning (Primacy Effect) & the end of the list (Recency Effect) and fewest words from the middle.
Therefore, Eye-Witnesses may be missing key information about what happened when the crime was taking place.
give 2 points for the evidence for reliability:
Yuille & Cutshall (1986) studied a local shooting & robbery in Vancouver & found that the accuracy of recall did not decline even after 5 months. The shooting took place in view of several witnesses, who were later traced by the researchers. The level of accuracy was impressive when compared with the original police reports. Misleading questions had no effect on accuracy of recall. Those deeply affected by the events were most accurate. So, when an event is personally meaningful, rather than being an experimental video (Like in the studies completed by Loftus), then eye-witness memory is good.
Real life eyewitness accounts suggest Eye-Witness Testimony is accurate. Yuille and Cutshall found that participants were still able to give accurate accounts of a crime 4-5 months after witnessing the original event. This suggests that Eye-Witness Testimony is reliable.
give 2 points for evidence for unreliability:
Loftus & Palmer (1974) showed participants videos of traffic collisions & then gave them a questionnaire to test their immediate recall of the videos. Participants were asked ‘About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other’. In other groups, the word hit was changed to smashed, contacted, collided & bumped. The speed that participants estimated the cars were going changed depending of the word that they were given. Supporting schema theory that people’s schema’s associated with different words can affect their recall of events.
Allport & Postman (1947) showed participants an image of a black man and a white man on a train.
The participants were much more likely to report that the black man was holding a cut-throat razor when in fact it was the white man. This is likely to be because of racial prejudices during the 1940’s and the influence of this pre-existing schema on the recall of the picture.
